Tuesday, 3 June 2025
In the hands of maniacs ... how did it happen?
Monday, 2 June 2025
A Glimpse Of A Hideous Future
At 3.12pm on a sunny spring afternoon in St Albans, Yasser Afghen reaches for the iPhone in his jeans pocket, hoping to use the three minutes before his son emerges from his year 1 primary class to scroll through his emails. As he lifts the phone to his face, Matthew Tavender, the head teacher of Cunningham Hill school, strides across the playground towards him. Afghen smiles apologetically, puts his phone away, and spends the remaining waiting time listening to the birdsong in the trees behind the school yard.
And this is seen as a good thing, that a grown adult behaves like a chastised schoolboy on sighting the headmaster?
Yes, Reader, because the leader of any cult wields enormous power, and mark my words, this has all the hallmarks of a cult.
A one-storey 1960s block with 14 classrooms backing on to a playing field, Cunningham Hill primary feels like an unlikely hub for a revolution. But a year ago, Tavender and the school’s executive head, Justine Elbourne-Cload, began coordinating with the heads at other primary schools across the city, then sent a joint letter to parents and carers across St Albans: the highly addictive nature of smartphones was having a lasting effect on children’s brains. The devices were robbing children of their childhood. Could parents, the letter asked, please avoid giving them smartphones until they turned 14?
And obviously enough didn’t screw the letter up and hurl it at the nearest wastebasket with a muttered ‘Jumped up little pipsqueak!’ to prevent him going ahead.
A year later, it’s clear that St Albans is still far from a smartphone-free city for under-14s. And yet, something small and potentially significant has shifted.
Oh, really?
...in May, at the start of the summer term, Tavender and his colleague Elbourne-Cload convened a parents’ meeting. “It was the most well-attended meeting we’ve ever had,” he says. “About 80 people turned up; normally we get about 40 to 50. We tagged it on to the end of a meeting about reading – which is the most critical thing in primary education – and just eight people turned up to that one.” The teacher who was leading the reading session was disconcerted to see crowds of parents outside the door, all staring at their phones, waiting for the meeting about phone use.
How very dare they! Who do they think they are?
Tavender, with his grey V-neck jumper (an adult version of school uniform), grey trousers and greying beard, is not an obviously revolutionary figure. He talks about his fondness for watching golf. His delivery style is a bit wearily monotone, as if he’s reminding the room for the 15th time of what he considers to be acceptable behaviour in the lunch queue.
Well, not every cult relies on a charismatic leader, clearly…
“When you’re ready for your child to stop being a child, give them a smartphone,” he tells them, running them through a series of slides provided by Smartphone Free Childhood. “WhatsApp is the crux of all evil, in my mind.”
Anyone else would have said drugs, underage sex, knife culture, but no, a simple useful messaging app is the bogeyman, according to this idiot. 🙄
Most powerful is his readiness to talk about his own struggles. “I’m addicted to my phone. I absolutely am.”
Converts are always the worst, aren’t they?
By the end of the meeting, many parents have agreed to become ambassadors and work to persuade fellow parents to sign the Smartphone Free Childhood pact, in which they promise to delay purchasing their child a smartphone until they turn 14.
Yes, this is, after all, how cults work - hook in the newbies and send them out, all bright-eyed and bushy tailed, to proselytise!
Six months after the Southwark initiative was announced, Mike Baxter, head at City of London academy, said pupils had been issued with mandatory phone pouches. Any pupil found with a smartphone out of its pouch and switched on would have it confiscated for a week. “We’re confiscating about 15 a week,” he says. The school is doing random bag searches. “You have to rigorously implement it.” Next year, the school will prohibit ownership of smartphones for all children in year 7; any child who comes to school with one will have it removed for a month.
Gosh, if only they took the same hard line with disruption and assaults….
But a quick walk around St Albans suggests that there may not yet have been a fundamental shift. Teenagers in school uniform queueing up for hot drinks in the city centre after school awkwardly balance iPhones, school bags and coffee cups.
The kids are alright...
Sunday, 1 June 2025
What if Brits refused to fly to western Europe and the Med?
Saturday, 31 May 2025
There's really no such thing as AI
Friday, 30 May 2025
Time To Start Rooting Out The Infiltrators?
The Mail on Sunday can reveal that NHS employee Omar Abdallah Mansuur, 39 – an influential imam – faces claims that he decreed a fellow Muslim should get the death penalty for insulting the Prophet Mohammed. His broadcast was made to tens of thousands of followers and is thought to be the first time a cleric in Britain has made such a threat.
In some of his inflammatory diatribes, Mansuur appears on video from inside St Thomas’ Hospital – directly across the Thames from the Houses of Parliament – where he works in procurement.
YCMIU, could you? And these days you no longer have to…
Staff describe bespectacled Mansuur, a British national of Somali origin who lives in North London with his wife and children, as unassuming and polite. But his social media profiles tell a different story.
Shocker!
On Friday, after the MoS passed on its evidence, the hospital said Mansuur had been suspended pending an investigation.
And hopefully, the police will be taking an interest too. How many more of these have infiltrated our institutions?
Thursday, 29 May 2025
Wednesday, 28 May 2025
Yet More Pointless Legislation Begged For...
A bereaved mother has said getting more rights for parents would take her one step closer to making something positive come out of the loss of her son.
Ellen Roome, from Cheltenham, believes her 14-year-old son Jools died after an online challenge went wrong and his social media accounts could provide the evidence needed. She has been campaigning for "Jools' Law", which would allow parents to access the social media accounts of their children if they die, and the petition is due to be debated in parliament on Monday.
Isnt this more a matter for the police?
Jools was found unconscious in his bedroom in April 2022. An inquest into his death found he took his own life. The coroner at the time said it was unlikely he intended to end his life, but the exact events leading up to his death were unclear.
Sounds like the coroner doesn’t really know what happened, so why would the social media access make a difference? Surely if there was anything to find, the police would have found it?
Forensic data of Jools' phone was not gathered at the time and Ms Roome has been asking for access to his social media accounts for more than two years.
Ah. Sounds as though she’d be better off campaigning for better policing to me…
The hill to die on
Monday, 26 May 2025
But Did Anyone Really Notice?
In the early hours an IT engineer raced into work through the dark, wintery streets of Redcar in north-east England. The dash was prompted by a worrying alert about the council's computer network, and he was soon hurriedly shutting down servers to try to halt the spread of a virus. It was too late. Hackers had scrambled Redcar and Cleveland Council's IT systems and would soon demand payment to restore it.
Wow, sounds more exciting than the new ‘Mission Impossible’ movie. I suspect it wasn’t quite like that though….
By 11:00 GMT on Saturday, local residents began to notice the council website was offline. "There wasn't a lot we could do," Mrs Lanigan said about efforts to stop the virus. "You had to be practical, so it was actually getting more phones in there so that people could ring us."
News was spreading, but Mrs Lanigan, who lost her position in the 2023 local elections, claims she received pressure from council officials and central government not to speak out. The council declined to be interviewed about the attack but said there had been no pressure or instruction not to speak publicly, either at the time or since.
Hmm, who to believe?
"It was devastating," she said. "Devastating for us, for the staff, for the public and for everybody else." They had lost the ability to share information with police and the NHS, while social services and elderly care services were knocked out, she said. "Even somebody ringing up and saying 'my bin hasn't been emptied' wasn't dealt with."
And…did anyone think that was unusual? Did anyone actually leap to the conclusion the council had been hacked, or did they just shrug and think ‘Same old council service!’..?
Sunday, 25 May 2025
The vaccine injured
… this is an excerpt:
“It’s an award winning documentary (it won Best of Festival and Best Director at the 2025 Santa Monica International Film Festival) detailing the experiences of the vaccine injured. It opens with a public gathering of the vaccine injured, and a young woman speaking of her experiences, of going from being healthy to disabled. As she tells her story, she shakes uncontrollably due to her vaccine injury.
Numerous personal stories are shown, including of people who were participants in Covid vaccine trials. Maddie de Garay’s story is told – she was, at the outset, a healthy, active 12 year-old, who enrolled in the Pfizer trial with her parents’ permission, but is seen in the documentary in a wheelchair, with a feeding tube in her nose that she relies on, as a result of her rapid descent following her second vaccine.”
Yet the PTB and the greedy privatised medical profession continue to push Big Pharma. Yesterday, a friend wrote about an experience with such a doctor … really pushing, the doctor was, to medicate first, remedicate later, another customer. They themselves are under huge pressure from the cuckoo admin on huge salaries … push it or find another job, be blacklisted.